World Wide Wait : The Internet Has Become a Victim of Its Own Popularity; Online Traffic Can Be as Jammed as the Freeway at Rush Hour

In his book “Dave Barry in Cyberspace,” the syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald writes: “Entire new continents can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

Internet growth has been so explosive that the Net has become a victim of its own popularity. For big events such as the presidential election, the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards, so many people try to sign on to the key Internet sites that traffic is clogged like the Santa Monica Freeway at rush hour.

In the immediate aftermath of the Heaven’s Gate suicides in March, traffic on the cult’s Web site was so heavy that large numbers of users couldn’t connect to it, and the Minneapolis system hosting the site almost crashed. At least one other site did crash--by mistake. Web addresses can be long and complicated--a mixture of words and a seemingly random series of letters, numbers and symbols--”https://www01.instantsports.com/base ball/mlb1997/htmlpure/games/dt19970505/CurSit1997050523270.html,” to pick one at random--and typing even one wrong character can result in a misconnection or no connection.

Amid the cyberfrenzy that accompanied the Heaven’s Gate suicides, more than 8,000 Web users trying to access the cult’s Web site added an extra letter to the cult’s Web address by mistake--heavenvsgates.com instead of heavensgate.com--and reached a totally unrelated site. That site crashed under the heavy barrage.

Internet users spend an average of 16 minutes online per call--four times longer than the average residential phone call and eight times longer than the average business call--so even during normal times, access can be delayed. Indeed, most Internet users say their biggest complaints are (1) the difficulties they encounter just making a connection and (2) the slow speed at which information and, especially, photographs and other graphic material can be retrieved once they are connected.

For many, this undermines the unique appeal of the Internet. People who have RealVideo software on their computers delight in being able to view, for free, scenes from movies being reviewed on certain online sites. But with a 28.8K modem, it takes 16 minutes to download a postage stamp-size, 54-second video clip.

Internet professionals who rhapsodize about the glories of the online life often have high-speed connections that greatly minimize these problems and blind them to the obstacles facing the typical user, to whom the Internet may seem not only slow but “hugely complex and intimidating,” says Kim Polese, chief executive officer of Marimba, a leading Internet technology provider based in Palo Alto.

Using the Internet remains a frustrating and confusing process for many people, even on supposedly user-friendly sites.

America Online became the world’s largest Internet service, with 8 million subscribers worldwide, in large measure because it offered users simplified access to a steadily growing number of services through a single site--the World Wide Web, online shopping and banking, chat rooms, games, entertainment for kids, health and fitness tips, local entertainment guides and news from more than 100 newspapers and magazines, ranging from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times to Soap Opera Digest and the American Woodworker.

“Three or four years ago, we were smaller than Prodigy and CompuServe,” says Stephen Case, chief executive officer of AOL. “But we brought to the market a more visually appealing, easier to use service. We make sense of an increasingly chaotic world for people by taking a lot of the work out of it for them.”

But when America Online abandoned its policy of charging users by the hour in December and instituted a flat price of $19.95 a month for unlimited access, so many people signed up--and so many began staying logged on for so long--that even now, six months later, huge numbers of would-be users receive only busy signals and can’t get on at all.

The Gartner Group, a technology research firm based in Stamford, Conn., estimated earlier this year that AOL connection rates often dropped to 25%, which means that three out of four attempts failed. In March, the Web measurement firm Inverse found that AOL still had “by far the highest call failure rate” of the 14 Internet service providers it tested--60.3% (compared with 6.5% for CompuServe, which had the best record).

AOL has become the cyberspace equivalent of the St. Louis restaurant about which Yogi Berra, the former baseball star, once said, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

Criticism of AOL has been so intense that the company has had to enter into settlement agreements with 45 state attorneys general, as well as with private citizen plaintiffs in a major class-action suit, agreeing to provide refunds and credits to compensate for the access problems experienced by so many of its customers.

“Our members were eager for unlimited pricing, and while we thought we would have some bumps in the road, we didn’t expect it to get as bad as it was in December and January,” Case says.

Connection problems have diminished in many areas, he says, and “we should be in good shape everywhere by the end of June,” at which time he says AOL will have spent more than $350 million to “build out the system” to accommodate its customer load.

Faster modems, high-speed phone lines, cable connections and other mechanisms are being developed to address the problem of Internet delays, but using the Web figures to remain maddeningly slow for the foreseeable future, whether one uses AOL or any other Internet service provider.

Moreover, each new mechanism seems to have its own problems. The most common modems now in use operate at 28,000 digital bits per second; earlier this year, two companies introduced modems that work twice as fast--56,000 bits per second (56K). But the two products are incompatible, and many online services cannot handle 56K transmissions yet.

Even e-mail, perhaps the single most popular Internet service, is not as instantaneous as many people think. A recent Inverse study showed that the average e-mail sent at 10 a.m. takes almost 40 minutes to reach its destination. Almost every major Internet service that handles mail has suffered major screw-ups, slowdowns and shutdowns.

For many people, just buying and operating the basic tool required for Internet access--a computer--can be extraordinarily frustrating. That is one big reason--in addition to cost--that only 40% of U.S. households have personal computers while 98% have television sets.

“It’s a scandal, an outrage,” says Jon Katz, former media critic for the “CBS Morning News” and New York magazine and now the online columnist for hotwired.com. “You go to a computer store and no one waits on you. You have to get on the phone and call for help and no one answers.”

Part of the problem with cyberspace is that the computer industry--like the Internet culture it spawned--was largely founded by people who had little experience in either business or the mass media, by young engineers and computer buffs, by what Katz calls “geeks with no social skills, academic people and hackers and free thinkers and gurus . . . and suburban outcasts . . . who don’t come out of a sales/service culture and who never imagined how the medium would grow.”

When you want to read a newspaper, all you generally have to do is open your front door, bend down, pick the paper up and take off the rubber band. No owner’s manual or technical support line is required. Of course, a newspaper isn’t a mechanical device; it should be simple to use.

But what of all those mechanical devices that we take for granted?

Would 94% of the homes in the United States have telephones if people got busy signals most of the time? Would the refrigerator be commonplace in the American kitchen if people had to remove the back periodically to upgrade it? What if the digital readout on your microwave oven often said, “This program has performed an illegal function and will be shut down”--incinerating your dinner in the process?

Suppose you had to bring your new car home in boxes and assemble it--and six months later, it refused to go where you wanted it to because you hadn’t installed the latest version of its operating system? Suppose you had to wait for your television set to “boot up” every time you turned it on--and it often couldn’t find Channel 7 . . . and it “crashed” when you wanted to watch “Seinfeld” . . . and destroyed your 10 favorite videos?

No wonder many of the more cautious cyberspace gurus say the Internet won’t become a true mass medium until the technology is vastly simplified. But they all agree that it will be simplified.

“There’s too much money to be made” for that not to happen, says Bob Ingle, president of new media for Knight Ridder.